Carbon/carbon (“C/C”) parts are employed in various industries. An exemplary use for C/C parts includes using them as friction disks such as aircraft brake disks, race car brake disks, clutch disks, and the like. C/C brake disks are especially useful in such applications because of the superior high temperature characteristics of C/C material. In particular, the C/C material used in C/C parts is a good conductor of heat and thus is able to dissipate heat away from the braking surfaces that is generated in response to braking. C/C material is also highly resistant to heat damage, and is thus capable of sustaining friction between brake surfaces during severe braking, without a significant reduction in the friction coefficient or mechanical failure.
A circular needle loom may be utilized to form a circular preform, for example, for use in creating net shape carbon brake disks. Various textile technologies exist for fabricating a continuous carbon feed form for a circular needle loom, including yarn placement, stitch bonding, pre-needling, and loom weaving with conical take-up rolls.
Significantly, prior art looms and other apparatuses for manufacturing circular preforms suffer from inefficiencies in the manufacturing process. For example, a brush bed plate for a circular needle loom may be utilized to prepare a net shape brake preform. A rotary brush bed plate may be utilized to meet the transport and needling specifications of a thicker fibrous structure like a brake disk preform. However, maintenance and cleaning of the brush bed plate, and removal of the finished preform from the bed plate create extra steps in the needling process. These extra steps, among other reasons, substantially add to the time required to manufacture the preform, resulting in reduced efficiency, lower output and increased cost. Such brush bed plates are therefore generally not suitable for high production rates.
Furthermore the brush bed plate does not always provide sufficient anchorage of the bottom layers, resulting in some cases of preform transport interruption during fabrication. The characteristics of the brush may change over time, thus resulting in higher maintenance and possibly in higher part to part characteristic variations than a smooth bed plate.